Who here follows webcomics on the regular? I need to know so you can tell me your secret, because I am always poking my head into webcomics and then forgetting to keep track of them. Even ones I really love, like Check Please! I just checked Check Please right now and guess the hell what, she’s updated since I last checked in, and I didn’t even know about it. Shit.
(WordPress’s SEO analysis feature right now is like WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT SOME OTHER COMIC IN THIS POST ABOUT STRONG FEMALE PROTAGONIST yes yes good point WordPress, I’ll get down to business so you can relax)
Strong Female Protagonist is an ongoing webcomic the first volume of which my library recently acquired (yay!). It’s about a superpowered girl named Allison Green who has given up on the superhero life and wants to be a normal girl attending a normal college (well, normalish — she goes to the New School). In the aftermath of her life as a superhero, she’s begun to question the very concept of superheroes, whether her work made the world better in the old days, and whether she has the capacity to make the world better now.
(The full run of Strong Female Protagonist is still available for free online, or you can buy the trade paperback.)
The grounding point for Strong Female Protagonist1 is its belief in the fundamental decency of human beings, which is something I need right now, even if at times it seems hopelessly naive. It’s been hard this year to keep looking for the helpers, and hard to keep being a helper or even believing that there continues to be value in being a helper. Allison faces these same fears, and she continues, throughout the book, to try to find the good in people and to be the best version of herself.
Also, there are jokes! And the comics creator have done something very sweet, which is to retain the hover-over text from the webcomic in tiny captions at the bottom of each page. When Nimona became a book, some of the little extra-features that came from being a webcomic were lost, and I was sad about that. Yay for Strong Female Protagonist for retaining them.
But seriously, please tell me how to keep on top of webcomics. Help me, Obi-Wan Ke-Internet. You’re my only hope.
- “Jenny are you saying the book title a lot in the hopes that WordPress will forgive you for not saying it at all in the first paragraph?” I dunno maybe. ↩